Yeah, because THIS is what’s wrong with the game

RED ALERT! AHH-OOOGA! AHH-OOGA! BATTLE STATIONS! RANT INCOMING! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!

Ok, you’ve been warned. Today we start with a short practical exercise. In 30 seconds or less, name the top three things you think are wrong with WoW in its current state. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

(Jeopardy music.)

Finished? Good. I’m betting most of you came up with things like:

WoD thin content.

Blizz broken promises to the player base. (“Garrisons are optional play.” “Flying will be reinstated for Draenor in Patch 6.1.” etc.)

Garrisons — maybe a good idea but as usual Blizz went way overboard with them.

WoD professions are completely broken.

Idea that everybody in a raid but me gets to use my legendary ring kinda stinks.

Blizz has gone hog-wild with RNG for everything, even including whether or not you get the one vendor every week that sells the profession patterns you need.

Mythic requirement for exactly 20 means players not in a hard-core raiding guild are probably shut out of that level.

Certain classes and specs are virtually unplayable, or will be in 6.2 (SV hunter, Shadow priest, Destro warlock …)

Blizz snide, dismissive attitude toward its customers.

Progressive limitation of viable play styles — raid or die.

Well, I could go on, and I’m sure most of you could, too. But you get the idea — there are a huge number of major problems that Blizz could be working on, could be devoting its apparently stretched staff to improving.

I am going to go out on a limb here and bet that no one listed “It’s not dark enough in Kalimdor” as something requiring Blizz’s urgent attention. But yes, Blizz — that wacky priority-impaired WoW team — has seen fit to devote resources to “fixing” this Very Important Issue. Check it out here.

Dispensing with the whole priorities issue — because, DAMN, Blizz! — let’s examine this a bit. I regret to say that I had to sink to reading a few forum comments on it, and let me tell you if you think the fly/no-fly thing brings out the rabid mouth-foamers, they can’t hold a candle to the dark-nighters. From what I could tell, their main argument is “It’s more realistic.”

Yes, that’s correct, they insist on more realism in a game that features orcs, giant hideous monsters, dragons and all manner of impossible beasts, flying (well, for the moment) winged horses, teleportation, magic spells that can kill said hideous monsters, infinite number of resurrections from the dead, lands with perpetually orange vegetation and multiple moons and huge floating rocks, swords and other weapons that radiate light/flames/spooky-shadows, abilities like instant invisibility and levitation and shape-changing. A game in which the people are unaffected by nearly all weather, where no one ever has to sleep or go to the bathroom or do their laundry or take out the trash or visit their Great Aunt Bessie. A game in which people can run or swim forever without resting, where they can carry huge packs and never be affected by their bulkiness or weight, where vendors always buy anything you have to sell no matter how crappy it is, where broken gear is fixed instantly.

Yeah, because making nights darker would make this game MUCH more “realistic”.

(There have actually been some scholarly papers written on the whole concept of “realism” in fantasy games, and the fact that players have very definite ideas about what kinds of fantasy are permissible and what kinds are not, but that is a topic for another day.)

I personally hate the idea of more and darker zones during a given server’s night cycle. This is mainly because I am on a server that is matched to my local time, and I tend to play only at night. This means that I only ever get to play in darkened zones. I am someone who loves the light and the sun, and to always play in the dark gets very depressing very quickly for me. Additionally, darkened zones make questing and gathering and seeing mobs more difficult.

I find it annoying in the extreme that, given the whole no-flying evermore dictum from Watcher, I will likely be spending more time in legacy places like Kalimdor in the future, and now Blizz seems to be doing whatever they can to make that annoying, too.

(Tinfoil hat theory: Blizz is deliberately starting to make flying even in legacy areas more difficult and less aesthetically pleasing, because they have told us repeatedly that flying is not fun and bygod they are going to make sure it is not.)

And not for nothin’, but how come Blizz seems to jump through its collective ass to accommodate a few dark-nighters, but completely ignores thousands of people who want flying back?

Just another in a series of incomprehensible game decisions by Blizz. I stick by my explanation of the brilliant Screw With the Players Department.

(Addendum: Just saw this, it’s a nice satire of the whole no-fly flap, plus it is relevant in a kooky way to this post!)

End of rant. Thank you for your attention. Secure from battle stations.